Google has reorganized its AI teams and merged them under the umbrella of its AI research affiliate, DeepMind. The restructuring is intended to streamline Google’s various artificial intelligence projects and create a more cohesive vision for the future of AI. The move will also allow Google to leverage the expertise of DeepMind and strengthen its standing within the AI community. The reorganization is part of a larger effort by Google to consolidate its AI research efforts and continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with this groundbreaking technology.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has recently announced the establishment of Google DeepMind, a new division that will focus on artificial intelligence (AI). The new group will combine Google’s existing AI teams, DeepMind and Brain, and is expected to accelerate the progress of AI and help build more capable and responsible systems.
The CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, will head up the new group as CEO, while Brain co-founder Jeff Dean will serve as Google and Google DeepMind’s chief scientist. Their first projects include a series of powerful, multimodal AI models and the development of the most capable and responsible general AI systems, ultimately powering the next generation of Alphabet’s products and services.
DeepMind, founded in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014, has several noteworthy projects, including AlphaGo, a deep learning program that beat one of the world’s highest-ranked Go players, Lee Sedol in 2016, and AlphaFold, a program for predicting 3D models of protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Brain, on the other hand, was founded in 2011 under the Google X R&D program and has contributed to projects like Google Translate and TensorFlow, an open-source software library that allows users to train their neural networks.
Google has been investing heavily in AI technology, partnering with ChatGPT rival Anthropic in February 2023 to develop reliable and responsible AI. In the same month, the company launched Google Bard, a conversational AI service that drew mixed responses from employees. Despite concerns around the development of AI raised by the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai, he argues that “Conversations are starting in a serious way, which is cause for optimism.”
In conclusion, the establishment of Google DeepMind will undoubtedly revolutionize AI development, and the consolidation of the existing teams will accelerate progress towards more capable and responsible systems. The impact of Google’s endeavors in AI is expected to increase significantly in the coming years.